SSP-L Guidelines and Best Practices

SSP-L (ssp-l@lists.sspnet.resourcenter.net) is an unmoderated list designed to promote communication among those in the scholarly publishing community. We welcome contributions to SSP-L in accordance with our Guidelines and Best Practices. To subscribe, send an email with your name and email address to Linda Pocsik. Members may change their subscription options through the Member Center area of the SSP website. Access the Listserv Archive. To use the Online option, after you click on the link above, click on Not logged in (upper righthand corner). Use the email address you are subscribed with and the password you use to log into the SSP Member Center of the website. Guidelines for Posting to SSP-L

Scope of contributions. Topics of broad interest in the scholarly publishing community are welcome from anyone who wishes to contribute.

Announcements of conferences, events, or other resources. Such announcements may be posted if they are of broad interest to the community. SSP requests that organizations posting them provide reciprocal posting privileges for announcements of SSP conferences, events and resources.

Endorsements or discussions of products and services. Discussions of products and services are acceptable in the context of a request for information or sharing of an experience. Reasonable answers from vendors should address the question and should not be blatantly commercial. Creating artificial questions in order to spotlight products and services is a violation of these guidelines.

Advertising. Sending unsolicited advertisements of commercial products and services to the group, or to individual participants, or otherwise using the list as a source of prospective clients and customers, is not appropriate. Those who wish to advertise to SSP members are encouraged to contact our Development Committee to learn about advertising, exhibiting, and sponsorship opportunities.

Press Releases. Press releases with newsworthy information of interest to SSP members should be directed to SSP’s editors, not to the SSP-L. Editors may or may not choose to include them in the appropriate publications of SSP.

Job Postings. Please direct job posting to SSP’s job bank and not to the SSP-L.

Copyrighted material. Participants must not post any information protected by copyright without the permission of the copyright owner. By posting or responding to SSP-L, the sending party warrants and represents that it owns the copyright to such information, or has received permission from the person or entity who owns the copyright to such information. By posting information to SSP-L the posting party grants SSP and users of SSP-L the nonexclusive right and license to display, copy, publish, distribute, transmit, print, and use such information. Subject to the grant of this license, the posting party retains any other rights that the party may have to such information.

Defamatory, anticompetitive, and otherwise offensive material. Participants must not post or transmit any unlawful, threatening, abusive, libelous, defamatory, obscene, pornographic, profane, offensive, anticompetitive, or otherwise objectionable information of any kind, including, without limitation, any transmissions constituting or encouraging conduct that would constitute a criminal offense, give rise to civil liability, or otherwise violate any local, state, national or international law. SSP does not condone and will not be responsible for any such materials or resulting liability, including antitrust liability. In no event will SSP be liable for any special, indirect or consequential damages or any damages whatsoever resulting from loss of use, data or profits, arising out of or in connection with the use or performance of any information posted on this site.

Pricing Discussions. U.S antitrust laws make it illegal for competitors or potential competitors to fix prices in any way. This prohibition applies to discussion of specific prices, costs, or rates. The financial and criminal penalties for violating this law are very serious.

Contributor Identification. Subscribers to the SSP-L should identify themselves and their affiliations when posting or responding to the list. In addition, participants should voluntarily disclose any conflict of interest they have with regard to a discussion in which they participate.

Forwarding Postings. Participants are welcome to forward posts from SSP-L to non-subscribers. Participants in SSP-L should be aware that their posting may be seen by a broader community than the immediate list, whether by forwarding or through the archives. Any post from SSP-L that is quoted in other venues must attribute the original author and the source.

Unmoderated List. SSP is not responsible for the opinions expressed on SSP-L. While SSP does not undertake editorial control of postings or responses, SSP reserves the right to edit or delete all posted messages it considers inappropriate, or to deny access to the listserv to anyone who violates these guidelines. Participants of the listserv agree to defend, indemnify and hold SSP harmless from and against any damages arising out of or resulting from their online conduct in SSP-L.

Best Practices for Posting to SSP-L

Save the welcome message from the list. It has important information about list management and unsubscribing.

Only reply to the entire list when your message is both intended and appropriate for the entire list.

Do not reply to the list as a pure acknowledgment of receipt of a message.

Do not reply to the entire list when a question is posed by a list participant that will require tallying before the information is useful. The original sender can provide a summary of the responses later.

Make sure to send personal messages to the individual and not to the list.

Disagree respectfully and avoid ad hominem comments.

Do not send attachments to the list. If you have a short document that is all text, copy and paste the text into the message itself. If the document requires formatting to be useful or is longer than a few pages, send a message to the list with a very brief summary of the document and how those on the list can get a copy.

Use the subject line effectively so that those on the list can easily find saved messages on a topic. If a reply modifies the subject of the discussion thread, change the subject line correspondingly.

Delete extraneous text in a reply so that only the particular issue triggering the response from the original message remains. If the message begins to include more than two writers due to multiple replies, be sure to identify clearly who wrote what so that the logic of your response can be inferred by everyone else.

Do not use color, special characters, or formatting codes in your messages. Not all e-mail packages handle these in the same way and it is likely that some on the list will not see your message as you had intended.

If you use a ‘vacation message’ in your e-mail system when you are away, be SURE that it is configured to reply to each incoming addressee only once with the vacation message. (Not doing so can, in some cases, create a deadly loop in the listserv as each message triggers a reply from the person on vacation that is again sent to the whole list triggering another reply, and so on.)

Learned Publishing Access

The October issue of Learned Publishing is packed with fascinating, must-read articles!

If you are interested in open access, this new issue is for you. Our authors this month address piracy and its impacts on the success of open access publishing, challenging both green and gold OA models. In the first of two installments, interviews with senior publishers and editors produces original insights into how and why publishers launch OA mega-journals. And, looking at the broader context of Korean scholarly communications, another article shares the OA models in play in Korea.

The mission of the Society for Scholarly Publishing (SSP) is "to advance scholarly publishing and communication, and the professional development of its members through education, collaboration, and networking."

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